"The Wombat is a Joy, a Triumph, a Delight, a Madness!" ~ Dante Gabriel Rossetti

Friday, December 18, 2009

BitchBuzz: Blogging by Gender

My latest BitchBuzz column is up. It was sparked by the revelation this week that the uber-macho blogger James Chartrand is really a woman and the reasons she gave for that mask:

Blogger James Chartrand revealed this week that "he" is actually a she and deliberately took up the name after finding it impossible to make a living as a female blogger and facing ridicule and dismissal. It's hard to tell whether female bloggers were more disgusted that pretending to be a misogynist jerk actually worked or depressed that nothing has changed about the contempt for "ladies" who write.

Feministing put the revelation into the context of the "pale/stale/male-ness of the media" as a whole and pointed to a study by the University of Maryland demonstrating the disproportionate threats women face online when identified by gender...

As always, you can read the rest at BBHQ. One thing I forgot to include was trying out the Gender Analyzer to see what its opinion was and got the following: "We guess http://menwithpens.ca/ is written by a woman (55%), however it's quite gender neutral." So the AI was not fooled by the macho graphics of the page.

This here blog of mine? "We guess http://katewombat.blogspot.com is written by a man (56%), however it's quite gender neutral."

I find it fascinating, the variety of ways we read gender into things. How gendered is your writing?